her, so she would hold out if she could
against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the
remarkable thing was that even at the end of three weeks she _had_ held
out. But by this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free;
it was dealing with new quantities, a different proportion
altogether--and that had made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone
home in convenient possession of her subject. New York was vast, New
York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite
backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got
nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final
flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living
ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in
the marble of famous French chisels--all this, to say nothing of the
effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small
world-space both crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all events
effected an exchange; the elder friend had been as consciously
intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding in personal
revelation, had been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
poetry--it was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune
even than Maeterlink and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She
appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her hostess,
rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but what they
managed and what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim depths
of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her
central clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious
enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single alarm--the fear that
she really might act on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was
positively afraid of what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to
avoid it with piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to
leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, however light,
however just, however earnest and anxious, would be half good enough,
would be anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection--this now imposed
itself as a consistent, an inspiring thought.

Less than a month after the event that had so determined Mrs.
Stringham's attitude--close upon the heels, that is, of her return from
New York--she was reached by a proposal that brought up for her the
kind of q